Dan DeLuca is an Inquirer pop music critic. But his "In the Mix" column in the Weekend section ventures further afield, into books, movies, TV, the Internet, graphic novels and anything you might call "popular culture."
Email Dan at ddeluca@phillynews.com
The pop music spectacle at the Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia on Tuesday night began with a group of dancers in hooded medieval garb pulling a rope that made a giant, smoking thurible suspended from the rafters swing back and forth, while a Basque folk trio chanted the name of the show's star.
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Dan DeLuca: Two of the biggest names in American music will go to work in Philadelphia on Labor Day weekend.
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Beanie Sigel discusses new album, his 'Expensive Taste'
- "This Time," Beanie Sigel's sixth album, will relaunch Ruffhouse Records. Then come two weeks of promotion, emotion, commotion, and the Philadelphia rapper's off to do time - again.Dan DeLuca: Surrounded by gold and platinum records hanging on the wall, Beanie Sigel is leaning back in the Conshohocken offices of Ruffhouse Records, talking about his "Expensive Taste."
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'Best band in America' stops in tonight
- The Ohio roots-rockers dubbed "the best band in America" stop in with their sweet-tart, never cheery, always bracing songs.Wussy, the Ohio roots rockers, will perform its sweet-tart, never cheery, always bracing songs at World Cafe Live at the Queen in Wilmington. (And Philly's North Star Bar on Friday night.)
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Sigur Ros gives the Mann Center's stunning new space an ethereal inauguration
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The Skyline Stage at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts could hardly have made a more stunning debut then it did on Sunday, when Icelandic ambient experimental ensemble Sigur Ros opened its U.S. tour with the first show of a sold-out two-night stand.
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Ocean's coming out a positive move
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Dan DeLuca: Shouldn't the first question be "Is Frank Ocean good?" rather than "Is Frank Ocean gay?" Of course, it should, so let's start off by answering that query.
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A trip definitely worth taking
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Dan DeLuca: How many Neil Young movies is too many? For Jonathan Demme, two was not enough.
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A sizzling selection of songs for summer
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Dan DeLuca weaves together a playlist for your summer listening pleasure.
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Coldplay entertains Wells Fargo Center
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Dan DeLuca: It was tough to tell whether you were at a theme park or a pop concert Thursday at the Wells Fargo Center, where Coldplay was playing the first of back-to-back nights.
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The Flatlanders still kickin' it 40 years on
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Even if you put names like Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen in the hat, it'd be hard to pull out an act that has made more fruitful use of the road than the Flatlanders, the three country-plus song-poet troubadours from Lubbock, Texas, whose intertwined careers led them to the Sellersville Theater in Bucks County on Thursday night.The trio of roadhouse rocker Joe Ely, Zen country mystic Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and philosophical tale-teller Butch Hancock started off their nearly sold-out show in the former livery stable off Route 309 by taking turns at the microphone on Ely's "I Had My Hopes Up High." "I left my home on the great High Plains / Headed for some new terrain," Ely sang in that song's opening line, setting the tone for an evening about the itch to roam and the fleeting wisdom acquired along the way.
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Review: Bonnie Raitt, nice and easy
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So it's not a big surprise that her music has aged as gracefully as she has, now that the 62-year-old redhead has lived as long as the bluesmen and women she apprenticed under when she was a Radcliffe dropout living at 17th and Lombard and serving a musical apprenticeship at the Philadelphia folk club the Second Fret.On Saturday night before a packed house at the Academy of Music — where she saw the Band perform in 1969 — Bonnie Raitt played an ingratiating 90-minute set in support of Slipstream, the new album that's her best since the run of LPs like Takin' My Time (1973) that predated her commercial breakthrough with 1989's Nick of Time. Raitt fronted her longtime touring band, augmented by Hammond B-3 whiz Mike Finnigan, who took the mic for a spirited rip through Ray Charles' "I Got News for You" that allowed the leader to stretch out most satisfyingly on guitar. Raitt's slide provided a sharpened edge to John Hiatt's "Thing Called Love" and Bob Dylan's lament "Million Miles," one of four Joe Henry-produced tracks that are Slipstream standouts.
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